TheAgitator.com
Must-Have Software
Monday, October 20th, 2008Slate has posted a list.
What do you think, Agitator readers? Care to share the add-ons, freeware, or shareware that have changed your life?
I’ve become quite fond of a little gadget called “Capture Me.” It’s a resizable transparent window that takes a snapshot of whatever portion of your screen you put within its borders. It then saves the snapshot to your desktop as a JPEG. Pretty handy.
Feel free to leave your own must-haves in the comments.
TClockEx replaces the clock Windows has in the lower right corner. It can be configured to show date and time in various formats. The ability to show seconds is worth the purchase price (free) all by itself.
First and foremost, Linux. Whenever I deal with Windows, all I can think is, “Why did I ever put up with this shit?” The answer is that I didn’t know better.
I would recommend Evernote. I’ve been using it for about three weeks, and I’m ultra-impressed by its abilities.
I also recommend the VLC media player. It works for a broader range of formats than Windows Media Player, without all the gratuitous flashy crap Microsoft insists on putting in.
Computer Zen
TrueCrypt
Eraser (for Windows users)
Quicksilver. It’s free and with it you can quickly launch your programs, open your bookmarks, control your iTunes music, and summon files. All you do is press a hot key to launch it and the type what you want, for example I press “Ctrl+Space” then “ag” and my browser opens the Agitator.
I agree with Number 6. Linux, Linux, Linux. A feed aggregator that shows notifications when new content is added is a must have. I use two of them, one for news sites, and a separate one for blogs. I don’t remember the names of the aggregators right off hand (I’m on a Windows PC at work right now), but I live on my feeds and my podcasts.
Foxit Reader is waaaay better than Adobe Reader.
Question: Does anybody know of a PDF creator/editor available in freeware, or at least an affordable one????
Notepad ++ – Replaces the recommended TextPad. Invaluable, especially for the programming types who want their code color-coded.
Treepad – Another great utility (one of the few where I paid for upgrade to their “Pro” version: a combination of Notepad and Windows Explorer; great for taking notes on various subjects. The Pro version also allows text formating, hyperlinks and embedded images.
PDFCreator – A free printer driver that lets you print documents into PDF files
Mozilla Thunderbird – My e-mail program of choice (especially with the Calendar plugin it replaces Outlook), given that Eudora 3 doesn’t support outgoing e-mail authentication that my provider requires.
Inkscape – An excellent replacement for Adobe Illustrator.
GIMP – Ditto, for Adobe Photoshop.
Paint.NET – Same, for those who prefer Photoshop-like user interface
Putty – A SSH client for remotely controlling my home computers (sorta like Synergy mentioned in the article)
WinMerge – Compares blocs of text; invaluable for comparing two versions of code. I used it also for comparison between the rejected EU Constitution and rejected Lisbon Treaty.
DOSBox – For all those MS-DOS games I’m still playing.
Mac OS has a native command (Apple+Shift+4) that does the exact same thing as this “Capture Me” thing. (Note: I am not a Mac nut. I hate their products, on balance. Still, credit where credit’s due.)
VLC and Media Player Classic have more or less made commercial video players redundant as far as I’m concerned. VLC plays more formats while MPC is more polished, but both of them together are more than enough to play anything I throw into my computer, with no annoying visual frills. Likewise for Winamp with music.
The author of the article is a Microsoft addict. He claims that MS Office is faster and more stable than open source alternatives like Open Office.org. He has no idea what he’s talking about.
Personally, I find that there is an open source app (in some cases more than one) that is far superior to the proprietary software for every function I need. The only exception to that rule is a game: Sim City 4.
Foobar – Excellent little music player, it’s not fancy but it’s small and uses few resources.
Rainlendar – Perfect little desktop calendar and organizer.
Netlimiter Monitor – To monitor internet usage, perfect for ISPs who have limits.
µTorrent – For downloading…perfectly legal torrent files!
CutePDF Writer – Allows printing to PDF files. I prefer it to PDFCreator.
FileZilla – Great little free FTP program, works consistently.
Google Chrome – Light and quick a good alternative to IE and Firefox.
VLC – For video files WMP and others can’t seem to handle.
Thunderbird – Powerful and easy to use, makes managing muliple email accounts simple.
I’ve got to disagree. I hate Open Office but I love MS Office 2007. Microsoft hatred is unbecoming.
I agree with Jozef on Inkscape and GIMP. For email, though, I prefer Evolution to Thunderbird. For Music, I use Amarok, but I need to use a separate podcatcher.
OperaTor – Opera + Tor. Surf anonymously
OperaTor is a portable software bundle which allows you to browse the web anonymously. It combines the power of the Opera Browser, Tor and Polipo.
With OperaTor no data will be stored at the computer you plugged your portable memory into.
http://archetwist.com/opera/operator
Rocker is a tiny little app for browsing ease. By clicking the right and then left mouse button, it pages backward and by clicking left then right, it pages forward. Works in Windows Explorer as well.
MAME
Oh boy, one of my favorite subjects:
DUFF – Duplicate file finder. Especially if you’re a digicam photo hoarder, this’ll help keep things neat.
http://dff.sourceforge.net/
RED – Remove empty directories. Just like it sounds.
http://www.jonasjohn.de/lab/red.htm
TREESIZE – Again for the file hoarder, helps keep things neat. A virtual view of where stuff is on your PC.
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml
INFRARECORDER – A free CD/DVD burner for those that don’t need the bells or whistles or price of Nero.
http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/
K-LITE CODEC PACK – Allows you to play virtually ANY movie of ANY type anywhere on the internet. Also includes Media Player Classic. Essential.
http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm
Firefox was mentioned in the article but I’d also stress that it’s the plug-ins that make it so valuable. Some I use:
IE tab, for pages that don’t render correctly in Firefox.
Google preview, see a page preview image in a google search.
Gmarks, Centralized bookmarks, if you use multiple computers.
Gmail manager, use multiple Gmail accounts at once.
Adblock plus, advertisement blocker, speeds page loading.
Filterset.G updater, auto updates Adblock plus.
Bugmenot, bypass login for free sites. NYT for example.
And finally, you’d better get up from that computer some time:
GOOGLE MAPS PEDOMETER – no, you pervs, go out for a walk!
Who uses TextPad anymore? Notepad++ is the way to go.
Zotero is a Firefox plug in from the very smart people at George Mason’s Center for History and New Media. It is a web super-savy citation manager that downloads citations from online databases or websites and can format them into bibliographies in most major styles without leaving your browser. It’s free and can integrate into MS Word and export to commercial citation managers for more robust notes and organization.
It comes with approachable developers and an interested user community.
Did I mention it is free?
A lot of free apps with source code can be found on sourceforge.net
7-zip (compression better than Zip and Rar)
CCleaner (clean cookies, browsing history, etc)
CD Burner XP (free CD/DVD burner)
CPU-Z (CPU and DIMM specs)
PC Wizard (system specs)
Command Prompt Here PowerToy (from Microsoft)
FastStone Capture and Image Viewer (faststone.org)
ToDoList (from codeproject.com, tons of free Windows source)
RocketDock (Mac-like shortcut bar)
Already mentioned: Notepad++, Paint.net, PDFCreator, WinMerge, SysInternals
Vice those saying VLC Media player, I’ve found that the best player I’ve used is ZoomPlayer, which is included with the Combined Community Codec Pack (Hah! CCCP, and they follow the red/yellow theme)
http://www.cccp-project.net/
I also use Miranda now, instead of Trillian. It’s kinda rough to set up, because it’s still beta with some weird option locations, but it does just as much as Trillian, and with better looking windows, and better IRC control.
http://www.miranda-im.org/
If you’re at all interested in genealogy or family history, the LDS has a fantastic bit of freeware called Personal Ancestral File. It’s what I use to organize all my research.
DVD Shrink
DVD Decrypter
ImgBurn
Slysoft AnyDVD (not free)
Ubuntu user here, so the list is largely meaningless. I use Firefox 3 but find it dismayingly unstable on Linux.
Surprised to see no mention of IrfanView, a Windows-based lightweight freeware image viewer/editor for which the Linux community seems to be desperately awaiting an effective port.
RipIt4Me also works for DVD ripping
Linux – whatever distro suits your taste
Gimp & Blender: graphics & video creation
GQview : image viewing
Midnight Commander : file mgr/ plain text/ ftp/ ssh
XMMS : audio player
VLC & Mplayer : video players
K3B : disc burning
RipperX : ripping CD’s
RoseGarden : MIDI & audio sequencing/ editing
Firefox & Thunderbird
Xterm : for dozens of things that don’t require the pointy-clicky thing.
Someone already mentioned DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter, but I’ll add DVD SANTA to the list. So simple and fantastic. How did I ever steal dvds without it?
Also SPYBOT. Haven’t used it for long so I don’t know of any long term repercussions, but it has definitely increased my computer’s performance.
(By steal dvds I mean, of course, that I back up those dvds I had already legally purchased, and never those I have rented from the local video store. Never.)
As an academic with lots of PDF journal articles, the Mac program Papers is irreplaceable. iTunes-like interface and still building up more features.
For playing videos: CCCP Codec Pack + Media Player Classic. CCCP was developed for playing encoded anime shows but it works for pretty much anything.
On the Mac side of things… I love Adium. It’s like Trillian, but better.
For those of you still using the antiquated WinZip,
I recommend WINrar, it’s much better.
I need to check some of these out.
When I clicked and saw this was Windows oriented, I laughed out loud. Once you have Linux, it’s easy as pie to get pretty much anything else you need.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Pidgin yet. Like Trillium, it’s a free IM client that supports several protocols…but it’s open-source AND runs on Windows or Linux equally well. It has a base install, and uses plug-ins to add extra features, so you only add what you expect to use.
I’ve never used Trillium, but have used Pidgin for many years and it’s better than anything else I know of (even Kopete – the IM client for Linux KDE desktop users)
http://www.pidgin.im/ – home page for Pidgin
I also suggest 7-Zip for zipped, “rar”ed and tgz-ed files.
I used to use IrfanView to convert my WoW screenshots, but don’t need to anymore. But IrfanView worked fine when I used it.
I’ll throw in my hat for 7-Zip. It beats WinZip and WINrar and doesn’t cost a dime. VLC Media Player is pretty good, but still in beta, which is to say it’s got a couple of glitches in Windows. Thunderbird is great, but needs better integration with the calendar add-on (coming, from what I understand). I use Pidgen rather than Trillian and it works fine for me. Spyware Blaster is a pretty good piece of freeware for helping to avoid unwanted nasties. My latest good find is RevoUninstaller for complete removal of programs including disk folders and registry items – it’s better than Window’s uninstall. Plus RevoUninstaller has a function to erase completely any trace of any file that you want deleted.
I like MediaMonkey to manage my music. It allows you to rip CDs to FLAC and convert to MP3 for portability, so I can use my computer with SONOS for music through my house that is very high quality.
Linux: for awhile now, I’ve tried it every couple of years, and it was always too arduous, too much to learn too fast, and basic things were a pain if they didn’t just work right away.
I just tried the latest Ubuntu Linux, and am now switching my main desktop to it. It’s that good. So if you tried Linux over a year ago, now is a good time to try it again. D/L and burn the live CD. You can play with it without installing, and installing is a painless process now.
My other software recommendation: WarHammer Online.
It’s a game that’s about killing nasty people who deserve it.
As a writer, Word Web is the handiest piece of freeware EVER!
http://wordweb.info/free/
The “Im Translator” add-on for Firefox was great as well, but as of yet is not compatible with Firefox Version 3.0.3